LXXV.

TO BERNARD BARTON. [1]

January 9, 1823.

Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan
of support beyond what the chance employ of booksellers
would afford you!

Throw yourself, rather, my dear sir, from the steep
Tarpeian rock slap-dash headlong upon iron spikes.
If you had but five consolatory minutes between the
desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century
in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers.
They are Turks and Tartars when they have poor authors
at their beck. Hitherto you have been at arm’s
length from them. Come not within their grasp.
I have known many authors want for bread, some repining,
others envying the blessed security of a counting-house,
all agreeing they had rather have been tailors, weavers,—­what
not,—­rather than the things they were.
I have known some starved, some to go mad, one dear
friend literally dying in a workhouse. You know
not what a rapacious, dishonest set these booksellers
are. Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost)
has made a fortune by book-drudgery, what he has found
them. Oh, you know not—­may you never
know!—­the miseries of subsisting by authorship.
’Tis a pretty appendage to a situation like yours
or mine, but a slavery, worse than all slavery, to
be a bookseller’s dependant, to drudge your
brains for pots of ale and breasts of mutton, to change
your free thoughts and voluntary numbers for ungracious
task-work. Those fellows hate us.
The reason I take to be that, contrary to other trades,
in which the master gets all the credit (a Jeweller
or silversmith for instance), and the journeyman,
who really does the fine work, is in the background,
in our work the world gives all the credit
to us, whom they consider as their journeymen,
and therefore do they hate us, and cheat us, and oppress
us, and would wring the blood of as out, to put another
sixpence in their mechanic pouches! I contend
that a bookseller has a relative honesty towards
authors, not like his honesty to the rest of the world.
Baldwin, who first engaged me as Elia, has not paid
me up yet (nor any of us without repeated mortifying
appeals). Yet how the knave fawned when I was
of service to him! Yet I daresay the fellow is
punctual in settling his milk-score, etc.

Keep to your bank, and the bank will keep you.
Trust not to the public; you may hang, starve, drown
yourself, for anything that worthy personage
cares. I bless every star that Providence, not
seeing good to make me independent, has seen it next
good to settle me upon the stable foundation of Leadenhall.
Sit down, good B.B., in the banking-office; what!
is there not from six to eleven P.M. six days in the
week, and is there not all Sunday? Fie! what a
superfluity of man’s time, if you could think